Obama’s Citizenship: Will the Haters Ever Give Up?

Stephen Piggott • Dec 04, 2008

While scanning a white nationalist message board I came across an interesting thread entitled “Obama: Don’t Miss Next Week’s Tribune.” The originator of the post was notifying other white nationalists to look at the Chicago Tribune on December 1st and December 3rd for a full page ad which would question Mr. Obama’s US citizenship.

The man who funded the ad is Robert L. Schulz, a New York tax protest activist. He claims to have spent tens of thousands of dollars to run the ads. Schulz is the founding member of the We The People Foundation. In the ad, Schulz accuses Obama of not providing an authentic live birth certificate from his birth state of Hawaii. The Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times both ran articles refuting the ads’ claims.

The Tribune says that Obama’s team produced a digital copy of his birth certificate and after critics questioned this move, the staff at FactCheck.org announced that they had examined the actual authentic certificate.

Schulz’s ad serves two purposes: first to show other white nationalists that he empathizes with them in their fight against Obama and secondly it is a plea to other white nationalist organizations to band together in these troubled times.

For years the tax protest movement has coordinated very closely with the white nationalist movement. White nationalists share many values with tax protesters who believe that the government should stay out of peoples affairs, there should be less limits on gun control and no increase on taxes. For many, the anti-tax movement was a stepping stone towards white nationalism. Since Obama’s victory, white nationalists and people who sympathize with their views are feeling increasingly isolated. This ad is just one of many efforts to consolidate groups associated with white nationalism. Schulz himself hints at this in his interview with the Chicago Tribune when spoke about the government trying to silence him and his hope that this ad would bring his group prominence.

Obama’s victory has been a crushing blow to white nationalists who cannot accept that a month from now an African American man will be the most powerful leader in the world. Across the country they are pulling out all the stops in a desperate and last ditch effort to prevent him from becoming president.

We must all be wary in the coming weeks and months of white nationalists attempts to gain prominence in a country that is slowly but surely isolating them. An attack on Obama’s citizenship is just one of many attempts to sabotage his credentials before he takes office.